Egyptمصر

Farming villages along the Nile grew into two kingdoms, Upper Egypt in the valley and Lower Egypt in the Delta, which were unified around 3100 BCE. The king was a god on earth who kept maat, cosmic order, and the state's scribes measured the annual flood to set taxes. Hieroglyphs, the 365-day calendar and monumental stone building all appear in the first centuries of this state.

The Old Kingdom (about 2686–2181 BCE) built the pyramids. Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara was the first large stone building; Sneferu's pyramids at Dahshur show architects learning to build true smooth sides; Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure raised the pyramids of Giza. The Middle Kingdom reunited the country after a period of breakdown and expanded south into Nubia.

The New Kingdom (about 1550–1070 BCE) was the imperial age. Kings ruled from Thebes, modern Luxor, and were buried in the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank. Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh; Akhenaten briefly replaced the old gods with the sun disc Aten; the boy-king Tutankhamun restored them; Ramesses II built Abu Simbel and fought the Hittites at Kadesh. Karnak grew over two thousand years as each ruler added a pylon, hall or obelisk.

After the New Kingdom, Libyan, Nubian (Kushite), Assyrian and Persian rulers came in turn. Alexander the Great arrived in 332 BCE; the Ptolemies, his Macedonian successors, ruled from Alexandria for three centuries and built the temples at Edfu, Kom Ombo, Dendera and Philae in traditional style. Cleopatra VII's death in 30 BCE made Egypt a Roman province.

Christianity reached Egypt early; tradition credits Saint Mark with founding the Church of Alexandria. Monasticism began in the Egyptian deserts with Saint Anthony in the fourth century. The Coptic Church split from Rome and Constantinople after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and remains the largest Christian community in the Middle East; Coptic, the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, survives in its liturgy.

Arab armies took Egypt in 639–642 and founded Fustat, the first capital on the site of Cairo. The Fatimids, a Shia dynasty from Tunisia, founded al-Qahira in 969 and the al-Azhar mosque, now the leading centre of Sunni learning. Saladin built the Citadel; the Mamluks, slave-soldiers who became sultans, ruled from 1250 to 1517 and filled Cairo with domed tombs and madrasas. Ottoman rule followed until Napoleon's invasion in 1798.

Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman officer, made himself ruler in 1805 and began modernising the army, farming and schools; his dynasty ruled until 1952. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, debts followed, and Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. Formal independence came in 1922, but British troops stayed at the canal.

In 1952 the Free Officers ended the monarchy. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal in 1956, built the Aswan High Dam and led the Arab nationalist movement until defeat by Israel in 1967. Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel in 1979 and was assassinated in 1981; Hosni Mubarak ruled for thirty years until the 2011 revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi was elected in 2012 and removed by the army in 2013; Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been president since 2014.

The Nile's two main branches meet at Khartoum: the White Nile from the East African lakes gives a steady flow, and the Blue Nile from the Ethiopian highlands brings summer floods and most of the silt. For millennia the flood arrived in Egypt in late summer, soaked the fields and left black soil, which the Egyptians called Kemet, the black land, as opposed to the red desert.

The Aswan High Dam, finished in 1970, ended the annual flood, gave year-round irrigation and electricity, and created Lake Nasser, over 500 km long. It also flooded Nubia, displacing about 100,000 Nubians, and threatened temples. A UNESCO campaign moved Abu Simbel, Philae and more than twenty other monuments to higher ground; several temples were given to countries that helped and now stand in Madrid, New York, Leiden and Turin.

Without the flood, silt no longer reaches the Delta, which is sinking and exposed to sea-level rise. Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, inaugurated in 2025, is a lasting dispute: Egypt depends on the Nile for almost all its fresh water and fears lower flows in dry years.

For travellers, the river is still the road. Cruise boats and dahabiyas sail between Luxor and Aswan, feluccas tack around Aswan's islands, and the green strip along the banks, sometimes only a few hundred metres wide, is where you see farming life that has changed less than the cities.

Ancient Egyptian religion had hundreds of gods, often shown with animal heads: Ra the sun, Osiris god of the dead, Isis his wife, Horus their falcon son, Hathor, Anubis, and Amun, whose temple at Karnak became the richest institution in the land. Temples were houses for the god's statue, not spaces for public worship; ordinary people prayed at household shrines and at festivals when the statue was carried out.

The afterlife shaped the monuments you visit. Mummification preserved the body so the soul could return to it; tomb paintings and texts such as the Book of the Dead guided the dead through the underworld to judgement, where the heart was weighed against the feather of maat. The Valley of the Kings' tombs are long painted corridors for that journey.

Today about nine in ten Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and around one in ten are Christians, mostly Coptic Orthodox. Sufi orders and saints' birthdays (mulids) bring huge crowds to shrines such as Sayyida Zeinab and al-Hussein in Cairo. The calendar has both Muslim and Coptic feasts, plus Sham el-Nessim, a spring festival with pharaonic roots that everyone celebrates on the Monday after Coptic Easter.

The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square, opened in 1902, held the national collection for more than a century, including Tutankhamun's treasures. The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, planned since the 1990s, opened in stages and fully on 1 November 2025; it now shows the complete Tutankhamun collection together for the first time, a colossal statue of Ramesses II in the atrium, and Khufu's solar boats.

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat received the royal mummies in a televised parade in 2021 and displays them in a darkened hall. The Tahrir museum remains open with thousands of objects from other periods; the Coptic and Islamic Art museums cover the later layers.

Many famous objects are abroad: the Rosetta Stone in London, Nefertiti's bust in Berlin, the Dendera zodiac in Paris. Egypt has campaigned for their return, and restitution debates are part of how the new museum is presented.

Greater Cairo holds over 20 million people. Life runs late: shops stay open past 23:00, families walk the Nile corniche on summer nights, and the ahwa, the street café with tea and shisha, is where men meet. Friday is the day of rest; government offices also close on Saturday.

Bread is so central that the word for it, aish, also means life, and subsidised flatbread is a political matter. Koshari, ful and ta'ameya feed the country cheaply; the Coptic fasting calendar, which forbids animal products for over 200 days a year for the devout, is why so much everyday food is vegan.

The economy has been hard since 2016: several devaluations of the pound, high inflation and emigration of young graduates to the Gulf. Tourism is a lifeline, and tipping (baksheesh) is part of how many workers make a living.